RCAH Opens New Center for Poetry
In Fall 2007, the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University officially inaugurated the Center for Poetry. The Center provides students, faculty, staff, and members of the community with a place where poetry resides in the form of textual resources, reading space, workshops, and a site for conversation about poetry and other arts.
In addition to bringing poets to campus to share their work through readings, workshops, informal gatherings, and one-on-one tutorials, we send poets out into the community to work with public school students, adult learners, and organizations. Our mission is to encourage the reading, writing, and discussion of poetry and to create an awareness of the place and power of poetry in everyday lives.
The Center for Poetry opened late in October 2007 with a series of readings by poets Anita Skeen, Gordon Henry, Carolyn Forché, and Diane Wakoski. In April 2008 we will celebrate National Poetry Month with workshops and readings by South Carolina poet Rick Mulkey, Oklahoma poet Jane Taylor, California poet Carol V. Davis, and our own MSU student poets.
The Center for Poetry is collaborating with the new Book Arts program to allow students to write and create their own poetry, broadsides, chapbooks, and artists books. Working with students in these areas this spring are visiting artist Arie Koelewyn of Paper Airplane Press; Jeanne Drewes, Chief of Binding & Collections Care at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC; as well as artists and scholars from the fields of graphic design, papermaking, book conservation, and rare book collections. The Center for Poetry and Book Arts courses are natural companions for individuals interested in combining literature, art, and public life.
The Center currently has a Program Planning committee working on a number of activities. Last fall, the Center participated in a Haiku Hike during Walking Toward Sustainability Week, and on a blustery October Friday a group of poetry enthusiasts chalked the sidewalk along the Red Cedar River with poems of strength and courage.
Plans have been made to chalk the sidewalk outside the Breslin Center with poems about women and sports before one of the MSU women’s basketball team games this season.
Students will be hosting a Poetry Slam in April as well as a Literary Marathon: nonstop readings from literature between noon and midnight.
Other units on campus with which we are currently working, or hope to work, are the MSU Press, the College of Arts and Letters, the Women’s Resource Center, the Canadian Studies Program, Residence Life, MSU Libraries, and the Public Humanities Collaborative. Eventually, the Center hopes to offer an annual poetry prize as well as continue to encourage the creation and publication of poetry in diverse venues.
For additional information please contact:
The Center for Poetry
C230E Snyder Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, Michigan 48864
Ph. (517) 884-1932
cpoetry@msu.edu
For more photos from the Fall 07 Walk Chalk Poetry event, click here